Friday 19 October 2007

The curtain unveils...

There has been some nice development in The Castle of Cadavers in the recent days.

This led to the decision to show everybody who's interested how the new tileset looks right now. Remember, work in progress! :)




This screenshot here features the dungeon part of the tileset. It is basically a dark, old and repelling place with spider webs and in the future, more prison stuff to literally make it a dungeon. The most recent additions to the tileset are the pillars and the spider webs. Both will change before the final release, but this screen shows their inputs for the tileset pretty good. This picture also features two kinds of walls and floors for flexibility, and the wall texture with three different variations of cracked bricks. The three versions don't differ dramatically but believe me, only one variation would have looked dull. The three brick textures are, however, only a beginning. Expect to see much more stuff inside the ground/wall in the final release of Castle Of Cadavers! (no buried shovels, though)

So, what next? More dungeon stuff! There are essential tiles to be done, as the dungeon part is the base of this tileset. Essential tiles are not so fun to draw, as variations of everything are always needed and therefore much, much repetition.

The development of Castle of Cadavers seems now to be back on its tracks, and I see no obstacles ahead. But one! I don't have not found any good music tracks that could fit in the atmosphere of the tileset. So, I challenge you, dear readers, to tell me what would you put in the background of that screenshot above. It can be dark, melancholic, angry, eerie or pretty much anything you'd hear when playing a centuries old, abandoned castle level. With rain outside! Write your suggestions in the comments or e-mail me. If I pick your choice for the final release, you get mentioned in the credits! Think about that :)

P.S. The current state of Castle of Cadavers reminds me strongly of the original Prince of Persia.

4 comments:

cooba said...

I suggest trying out Inferno (by Timelord) a try :)

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry Blade, can I just say something? You said adding 'prison stuff' would 'literally make it a dungeon.' Well, I suppose it's a pet peeve of mine but... I suppose what you mean is that it will make it look all the more like a dungeon. To literally make it a dungeon you'd have to somehow convert a person into digital format and load him into the tileset, trapping him like a prisoner, or alternatively, convert the whole thing into real life bricks and mortar and construct a dungeon out of it. Now, back to your tileset.

Don't you think the current usage of two different perspectives is incongruent? I see that the 'standard' floor is 2 tiles wide (floor tile, not JCS tile), so for the smaller, leaner platforms, draw a 1 tile wide floor, using the same perspective.

The Z-axis walls are also inconsistent. Apart from the cracks, they're totally monochromatic, so it looks as if they're made of a completely different kind of stone compared with the 2D walls.

I also see a strong resemblance with Prince of Persia, especially the two pillars to the left of Jazz that form a sort of gateway, which is a very common construct found in PoP tilesets. I am quite taken with it.

Michael said...

Looks good so far! The style is pretty different from your previous tilesets too, since the perspective is at more of an angle.

I'm not sure if the textures are done yet, I think there is a bit of a stylistic contrast between the solid brick textures, and the background wall textures (which are much more flat). Of course, you mentioned that some of this will change before the final version, so it's probably fine.

The only other suggestion I have in regards to this screenshot, is that it could use more colour. Maybe something organic, like vines?

Keep up the good work!

FreeFull said...

You could modify the pallete to make Jazz look a bit darker.